The Politics of the Personal: The Urge to Purge

Part 4 of a five-part series. Parts 1, [1] 2, [1] and 3. [1]

The transformation of mainstream movement conservatives into something closer resembling far-right extremists didn’t happen overnight. It came in bits and pieces, drips and drabs, piling up in small events that seemed innocuous enough at the time. Beginning in the mid-1990s, and increasingly so in the years after 9/11, figures on the mainstream right began picking up ideas, talking points, issues, and agendas from its extremist fringes: the xenophobic, conspiracist, fanatical religious right. These ostensibly “mainstream” figures would then repackage these ideas and talking points for general consumption, usually by stripping out the overt references to racism and xenophobic hatred.

These “transmitters” were often leading right-wing media luminaries, all reliably viewed as mainstream conservatives: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, Michael Savage. Some were public officials, like Sen. Trent Lott [1] (whose ties to the segregationist neo-Confederate movement came floating to public attention in 2002), Rep. Tom Tancredo, [1] and Rep. Ron Paul (the latter a 2008 Republican presidential candidate, despite his longtime proclivity [1] for “New World Order” conspiracy theories). And sometimes the transmissions came from people with one foot firmly in the fringe camp who manage for a time to disguise their agendas: for instance, Jared Taylor of the white-supremacist American Renaissance, who is skilled at posing as an academic expert on race relations and is presented on TV [1] as such; or John Tanton, [1] the mastermind of various “immigration reform” groups whose work tends to specialize in demonizing Latinos, who is himself financed by white supremacists.

Initially, much of the trafficking in exchanged ideas and themes -- “memes,” if you will -- in the 1990s revolved around bashing Bill Clinton, the loathing of whom was a shared pastime among both the mainstream and extremist right. So it was that charges laid against Clinton -- that he and his wife Hillary had conspired to murder White House Counsel Vince Foster, that Clinton had a hidden black “love child,” that he was conspiring with the “New World Order” at the United Nations to give away American sovereignty -- that originally circulated in the militia meeting halls and the gatherings of Montana Freemen were being circulated for broad public consumption a few years (or sometimes mere days) later, pushed there by leading mouthpieces of the ostensibly mainstream conservative movement. It culminated in the Clinton impeachment fiasco, which demonstrated the power of an increasingly fanatical movement to foist its political agenda on an unwilling public, which polls consistently showed disapproved far more of the effort to impeach Clinton than it did Clinton’s behavior.

But it did not end there, not even once Clinton left office (though a cottage industry did spring up on the right pinning the blame for everything that went wrong subsequently -- particularly the 9/11 attacks -- on Clinton). Indeed, if anything, the exchange accelerated in the ensuing years, driven particularly by three major issues: the 9/11 attacks and the “war on terror,” the invasion of Iraq, and immigration. In all three cases, the demonization of liberals grew sharper and louder, as did the reflexive reliance on conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fearmongering.

Most significantly, unlike the 1990s, when the mainstream media remained generally leery of conspiracy theories and xenophobic paranoia, it became common in the first decade of the new millennium to find kooky nonsense being broadcast to millions by supposedly respected mainstream news figures. Thus Lou Dobbs can broadcast maps [1] of a fanciful “Aztlan” (which figures prominently in the “Reconquista” theories [1]) taken from a white-supremacist website; or tell his audience that illegal immigrants are bringing a wave of leprosy [1] to American shores -- drawn, once again, from kooky far-right sources whose claims fly in the face of established facts -- and it raises scarcely an eyebrow. Bill O’Reilly can call DailyKos readers Nazis and Klansmen, [1] and no one but his targets seem to notice the outrageousness of the charge.

The thread running throughout this relentless demonization is scapegoating -- something inherent in movement conservatism’s project, and the trait that brings them closest to resembling the far-right extremist and his “quest for whom to blame and whom to eliminate.” Indeed, blame-laying lays the groundwork for purging, its final outcome being eliminationism: [1] the impulse not merely to defeat but to eliminate the opposition altogether, driving it forthwith from the body politic altogether, by whatever means might be at hand.

This eliminationism has become a defining feature of the modern movement conservative -- not bothering to argue the facts or merits of issues but to simply demand outright the (preferably violent) oppression, and ultimately the purgation, of elements deemed harmful to American society. It gets aimed not merely at Latinos and Muslims, but also its historical targets: blacks and Indians, gays and lesbians, Jews and other religious minorities. But perhaps most commonly and generically, and most casually, its target is the common liberal.

Mind you, this kind of rhetoric doesn’t constitute actual discourse, but is rather its opposite. Instead of posing an opposing idea, it simply shuts down intellectual exchange and replaces it with the brute wish to silence and eliminate. It’s rather like the village idiot wandering about the town square and poking the people he doesn’t like in the eye with a sharp stick.

A lot of eliminationist talk occurs on a small, personal level – from drivers being chased into their homes by road-enraged conservatives who spew death wishes at them for having the temerity to put a John Kerry sticker on the car, to travelers in a diner being told by angry right-wingers they can hardly await the day they can start rounding up people like them, to family members being uninvited for Thanksgiving for failing to be a conservative. But it’s been publicly encouraged -- and to a great extent probably created in the first place -- by a steady patter of similar talk from prominent right-wing pundits and public figures.

A brief sampling:

Rush Limbaugh: "I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus -- living fossils -- so we will never forget what these people stood for."

Ann Coulter: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Or: "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too."

Bill O’Reilly: “Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you're a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything and they don't care, couldn't care less.”

Michael Barone: “Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and ... transnationalism.”

Karl Rove: “Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.”

Kathleen Parker: “Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: ‘These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.’ "

These are nationwide transmissions of the rhetoric of violence, sometimes under the guise of "humor," whose underlying attitudes are not only transmitted to a wide audience, but the generally quiet acceptance with which they are broadcast itself sends a powerful message: that not only is this kind of talk acceptable, but the underlying attitudes are positively endorsed. Likewise, where there is silence on the part of decent mainstream conservatives, the kind of people who would act on this rhetoric hear tacit approval.

And that reality is perhaps the most disturbing facet of this trend. Mainstream conservatives -- button-down types who bridle at the first hint of liberal incivility -- seem to have developed an extraordinary, boiled-frog kind of tolerance for the increasing ugliness of their movement. They dismiss the violent chatter as mere “humor” and “entertainment” without reflecting, even momentarily, on the attitudes required to make this kind of humor actually funny. They can find reams of ponderous rationalizations for behavior and speech that is simply inexcusable.

It used to be that these mainstream conservatives were one of the real key bulwarks for any kind of fascist impulse in America, which has been in our bloodstream for over a century anyway, but could never find the political space to take root because, in large part, ordinary conservatives had rather little in common with them. In the span of the past decade, though, that has increasingly ceased to be the case.

Still, in observing the growing similarities between genuine proto-fascists and mainstream conservatives, it’s been easy to lose track of the differences. Yet some important ones remain – most significantly, the lack of street violence and thuggery, the eliminationist enterprise that is the true fascist’s hallmark. As much as they might threaten and bluster, movement conservatives lack the visceral, paranoid anger that animates so many actual fascists.

So I’ve devised a term to describe what’s taking place: pseudo-fascism. [1] Because while today’s movement conservatives like to talk and sound and make public policy like fascists, they lack the visceral violence with which fascists historically liked to back up their viciousness. That is, on the whole, probably a good thing, since it means that the situation is not yet irretrievable. At the same time, there is an inherent threat that the phony fascists could find the means and motives to eventually transform into the real thing – if not now, then perhaps even years down the road. The rise of pseudo-fascism means that the real thing could erupt at any time.

While it would be clearly incorrect to call modern conservatives “fascists,” the transformation of movement conservatism has created, in essence, the ground conditions for the eventual outbreak of genuine fascism. You need look no further than the ugly eliminationism now ascendant on the right to get a good look at this reality.

Perhaps I'm more sensitive to this kind of rhetoric than most, because I've been exposed to it for a long time. It is hardly different in nature from the kind of hate regularly spewed by the cross-burners at Aryan Nations, who of course hate mainstream liberals right alongside Jews, blacks, and every other permutation of their Other. One bleeds into the other for them -- and eventually, it does likewise for everyone else who partakes of this kind of talk. There is a special quality to eliminationist rhetoric. It has the distinctive stench of burning flesh -- of many varying kinds, but always the same stomach-churning smell.

Next: Where We Stand